Three Stories from the Fringe

Three Stories from the Fringe
By
Sunny Bu
November 4th, 2013











The Smiling Shrine of Sarasota Bay
By
Sunny Bu






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The Smiling Shrine of Sarasota Bay
    If a front page picture in the news means someone’s larger than life, Brandi is famous.  But Brandi’s dead and she’s not on a front page newspaper and probably never was.  Her face is in the shadows of a foot diameter oak tree which overhangs the rock barriers along Sarasota Bay, Florida.  What lies there is a memorial plaque of her and a picture of her hugging the very same tree with a sensationally spritely smile, some real and fake flowers, wind chimes and red and gold ribbons.  The wind blows the chimes and ribbons now like her spirit which takes off sylph-like among the surrounding sail boats into the Gulf of Mexico.
    The Smiling Shrine of Sarasota Bay, it’s called and the gaping mouths of walkers and joggers and hikers can’t solemnize the memorial she represents compared to our lives because her shrine’s unknown.  The shrine means nothing since Brandi’s not famous nor renown historically nor even storied among the sailors.  Her smile is desecrated daily with the puffs and the huffs and phews of passersby yet none stops and notices what Brandi saw.
    Out there, somewhere between the Gulf of Mexico and the horizon, the vision of Brandi’s life prolongs.  Through sunrises
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and sunsets and storms and seasons, Brandi’s face is smiling.  Her tree holds hopefully, too, just as hopefully to the edge of life and humanity as Brandi does in the picture.  So it is with Dean The Can-Man who often must supine on a long green bench not far from her memorial thinking, This is my resting place, too.
    It’s his resting place from the day to day exigencies of collecting cans from the trash all night and the extraneous endeavors of existence.  A loaf of bread is his meal this crisp autumn morning and perhaps a package of instant cocoa and coffee where full now, he flings off his boots and reclines just like Brandi despite the puffs and huffs and phews of passersby who trample the sacred spot both share.
    “Are you awake?” a voice whispers to Dean as his body reposes on the bench.
    “Sleepin’ ” Dean rejoins.
    “Remember me?” the voice pines.  “I’m Brandi”.
    “Brandi!”  Dean exhales and on he dreams as he smiles and nods off to sleep thinking “Just like my ex”.
    But Hound Dog Hank’s also there walking his dog and he, too, can’t but help stop and pat his hound’s head to squeeze in a look at the base of the shadowy oak to espy the sensational
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smile on Brandi’s face.  He peeks every morning wondering why she’s smiling with, or without, a thought that death overshadows her life like the gnarled oak tree now.  Yet he wonders: Did she, or didn’t she, know?
    Nonetheless, he doesn’t know why she’s smiling other than to smile and smiles back as he moves on with his day thinking “Just like my daughter, whom I love and cherish”.
    Whereas the City Park workers must face her expression everyday as does Ben the Matador from Mexico who’s exhilarated at the thought he’s entitled to guard and clean and inspect the area surrounding the shrine because he knows with his espousal of duties toward his family there’s no deterring him from catching any mischief makers or miscreants molesting the religious icon of such a holy Santa Maria shrine as Brandi’s.  His stout body poised on his riding mower bulldozes the half mile sward of property as he gently cuts swaths along the esplanade like a hippo its terrain and in passing thinks “It’s an honor to be here”.
    So does the English Man think that it’s an honor to be here coming daily down from his fifteenth floor condo along Bayfront Drive where he surveys the shrine and the Bay.  He stops now to inspect this bit of American reverence toward
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their dead, his tweed hat tipped and his red cardigan swathing his chest each sauntering step he makes around Ben the Matador and Hound Dog Hank and Dean The Can-Man.  He muses now as he ponders the sinewy arms of Brandi strapped to the oak tree thinking “An American Tragedy” as a novelist once wrote, “perhaps lost to the violence and evil machinations of these brutes” and tips his tweed to her shrine as he saunters closer.  “Jolly, just jolly, love” he sighs and vouchsafes to protect her memory and others’ like her from such dastardly deeds, even if it takes political posturing of installing a picture such as this memorial which no one knows or takes notice of or solemnizes with respect.
    And so it goes from day to day despite the dangers of what’s in the distance and the nemesis of the Gulf: Hurricanes.  A gale-force storm explodes one summer and launches it blows and slashing winds and cutting rains viciously at the Bay and the Shrine while Dean the Can-Man can no longer supine on his bench and Hound Dog Hang walk his dog and Ben the Matador swath the grass and the English Man saunter in his cardigan vest when it dawns on each one that nothing is there to protect the sylph shrine of Brandi.  No iron fence nor grave stone nor monument of lions can protect her picture and flowers and wind chimes and ribbons.  Nor can any stake fortify the tipping
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oak Brandi clings to in hope and this against the storm’s waves that claw it with spray and scratches it with sand and carves grooves in its roots at the base of the trunk until CRASH into the bay it’s washed away in one final submerging storm surge.
    The next day each follows his routine as regularly as the walkers and the joggers and the hikers minus the peeks and the glances and the uneasiness that something’s missing:  The Smiling Shrine of Sarasota Bay.  As it turns out the memorial plaque is gone and the picture blew away just like the sylph Brandi was because neither Dean The Can-Man nor the others knew that a loved one snatched her photo right before disaster struck and stowed it gently in a box and took it home.  Or so it was thought, as each eyed the other and Dean peeked at Hound Dog Hank with one eye open and Hound Dog Hank squinted at Ben the Matador as he pet his dog and Ben the Matador wheeled in swaths hawk-like around the English Man whose face was solemn and sedate.
    Hence Ben the Matador planted a sapling oak and Hound Dog Hank planted some flowers at its base and Dean the Can-Man hung some aluminum chimes from its branches and the English Man placed another plaque ‘In Memory of Shelly’ along with a more glorious, sensationally spritely and smiling picture

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of a six year old girl hugging a plastic dolphin as she was last seen sitting on the renown Siesta Key Beach.
    “My ex’s kid” Dean thinks and dreams and Hound Dog Hank pats his dog’s head thinking “Just like my little girl” and Ben the Matador places an angel thinking “This little girl needs protection just like my family” as the English Man saunters softly to the shrine feeling his job’s done as he wipes his tears and returns home to the photo of Brandi placed securely on his condo’s living room mantel with the front page picture in the news of a little girl and heading: “Millionaire’s Daughter Abducted and Slain”. 
     
   
   












Mannequins through the Window
By
Sunny Bu






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Mannequins through the Window
    She stares back at me through the outdoor café’s glass doors mannequin-still and eyes glinting.  My smile isn’t becoming.  In fact, it’s bromidic.  It’s the false reality and the face she’s showing, which is one pining, pained and puppy-lost.  I feel as if the reality between her and me are two different worlds, that Starbuck’s Coffee shop is between her and us and the looks the reflection of the false reality of the stereotyped setting.  I’m mentally blurred from the coffee and bicyclists surrounding her, those men whom represent a mainstream lifestyle whereas mine is ground zero compared to theirs seeing I’m from the outside and just a student.
    I see things from the outside, too, and have to, just as I see her deeper reflection and not her form.  The deeper reflection is my own self.  It’s broken, the soul and heart bleeding and the coldness of reality inner-city cruel.  I could never touch this  mannequin because it’s not real either, but I somehow smile my bromidic smile as her eyes meet mine.
    “Excuse me” I say opening the glass door.  “You’re in my way”, I say again stepping around her.  She heard me, and even saw me in the flesh what with the Bermuda shorts and the scar

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on my knee.  “A ‘sakura’ ”, I recall.  But what of the deeper wounds?
    “I know they’re homeless and need food and a place to live” one bicyclist mocks whiningly and plaintively.  He’s speaking of ‘the hordes’ across the street from Sarasota’s downtown Starbuck’s and raises his eyes towards them as if it’s their responsibility to feed and house them.  These are the Salvation Army’s ‘homeless hordes’ that gather here.  They sit in a park called Five Points Park and smoke spice.  Or so the local businesses say to have the cops keep an eye on them to contain the eyesore they represent.  They’re the legacy of  Florida and the center of attention.  So is she, and the bicyclists.
    But by now she’s hidden her face from mine.  It’s blocked by a bicyclist’s yellow, squeaky tight spandex shirt and glare of his sparkling  Schwinn racing bike.  I know he’s going somewhere quick, and she’s riding with him, and them.  I have to study so skirted on by and plopped myself at the last table nearest the socially safer Japanese restaurant. 
    That was a place I remember that was real.  Japan and the woman I knew from there reflect in the unreality between them and us now, which is one blinding and spell-binding from both viewpoints.  But what viewpoint I couldn’t see clearly, just as I couldn’t see her face.
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    Their cordial coffee relations end with a cacophonous clanging of metal chairs stridently scraping on concrete. Suddenly, nearby fire engines and ambulance sirens penetrate the air with screams.  A station is around the corner.  But if here at 6a.m., peace blankets you warmly.  Unfortunately, it just as suddenly ends when the city dump truck rumbles by.  The driver always gives me a honk and waves to alert me, however, just like the sirens now that this is the real reality.  But the dump truck driver’s smile is becoming, as if saying “I see you studying” and “Glad you’re hard at work, too”.   
      As if frightened, the bicyclists bustle through the glass doors, the mannequin in tow.  I feel her push her clanging chair gently beneath the metal table just as becoming as the dump truck driver’s smile and as if to say “I see you, too”.  A warm feeling stirs me like coffee. 
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    But there’s a colder feeling now as I walk through the café doors and look at my face in the glass reflection.  It’s a face I don’t want anyone to see, or know.  It’s the face of the past.  I was once a mannequin, but now I’m an outsider socially and economically and live outside the mainstream.  I push myself away as I open the door and step into reality.
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      Outside, the sunlight is an impasto painting on the pink and mauve condos and the chalk-white, Mediterranean color of the nearby Selby Library.  This is the veneer of Sarasota, Florida.  It’s a Hollywood veneer.  The plasticity is like L.A.  But what is reality compared to gastromancy and gourmet restaurants which tourists from Europe savor and businesses predict with future earnings?  Whole Foods and outdoor café’s reflect their predictions as crowds flood there now in downtown Sarasota.
    “Excuse me, do you have a dollar?” a homeless woman asks.  She’s plump and well fed and dirty, but I prefer not to call them homeless and sublimate my feelings.  They call them transients along the west coast. 
    “Yeah” I say after the uplifting experience at Starbuck’s.  “Here” and I hand her a buck and some change.
    “Oh, Thank you sir!” she says elatedly and skips along, probably to the park to buy some spice.
    Panhandling is something I’m familiar with, though.  I’ve lived in Seattle for seven years before.  There it’s a profession and an exigency for the downtrodden of the streets.  I’ve even seen transients train dogs to hold out hats in their mouths to passersby on the sidewalks near Pike’s Place market while they

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slept snugly beside them.
    There they often hung out in another park, however, one called Pioneer Square, where tourists sauntered as did horses and buggies and even Native Americans.  Big, bad bike cops did, too, due to the fact the transients stalked the sidewalks and it was near the business district and dangerous, as I found out one night on duty.
    A night security guard standing duty, I watched from the lobby one night as a transient slumped on the outside stairs entrance bleeding profusely from a knife wound, or so the paramedics said.  Not able to leave my post, I called 911 and an ambulance arrived with its sirens stifled and shuffled the transient through the back doors like a cadaver a morgue freezer.  He was pronounced dead on arrival, I later found out in the paper, and I had to wash his blood down the gutter as if it never happened and was just a blur.
    A third shift worker, my life blurred by just the same.  I could feel it draining from my face each time I climbed the steps to go to work just like the transient’s blood.  Was I, too, meant for the gutter? I glanced at the buildings and shops along downtown Seattle overlooking the lavender Olympic Mountains scintillating in the Pacific Northwest sunsets like Japanese watercolors by Horishige ad Hokusai.  The striking
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colors splashed crisply and poignantly against the horizon just like the artists’ woodcuts and now the wooden mannequins that reflected in the shops and on the streets.  Life felt, once again, unreal compared to reality and a fantasy world one couldn’t touch.   
    Just as I couldn’t touch the mannequin’s face at Starbucks and the one I saw at work one day coming up the outside stairs as if fresh from a Japanese watercolor.  She waved and smiled at me standing duty that day as she was new and on her way to her first day on the job at the office on the 8th floor.  A mug of Starbuck’s coffee shone bright yellow in her hand and led her like a beacon.  I could’ve waved but since I was on duty a nod “Good morning” was all that was needed, particularly because I also had to keep my hand on the page of the novel I was reading.  This perhaps made her think “Oh, he’s taking notice of me and marking me down in his log”, which I really would’ve liked to have done although more so in my diary.  That is to say, which is what I should’ve done-that is mark her arrival down in the log since it was her first day-but being a Pacific Northwest security agent there seemed to be no such excess precautions in this particular neighborhood we guarded.  The only concern was intellectual property and computers and transients. 
    “How are you in the rain doing?’’ I managed to squeeze in as
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the lobby’s elevator doors opened.  Once again, my word choice and syntax were screwed up.
    “Just fine” she squeezed back crisply as the elevators winked shut just like her crinkled eyes. 
    Her name was Ms. Kitano, as I later found out by looking in the directory, and she was a Nisei, or second generation American born Japanese.  Every day she arrived promptly at 6:20a.m., probably because Starbuck’s opened at 6:00 and the fact she wanted to beat traffic.  Either that or she was a dedicated, hard worker.  I rather gathered she was the latter because she was a lawyer and drove the sporty Japanese made Mazda that I espied in the underground parking garage as I made my last rounds.  Plus, she was Japanese.
    “So silly, me” I said to myself.  “How are you in the rain doing?” you dope.  How about “How are you doing with the rain?”  And like rain’s a reality none has to face here in Seattle.  Day after day it rains.  And why would she be in it? 
    I was going through the ‘crash’, or the period of depression when I came to the end of my 7p-7a graveyard shift.  Coffee was my raison d’etre’.  I had to stay awake to survive due to my boss’s surprise attacks so drank five cups a night.  But the other reason was to keep on my toes mentally as well so I could hear

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him coming.
    My boss was a martial artist and having his own keys to the building, sometimes snuck up on you ninja style to assure you were awake, which I always was because I, too, toted a mug of Starbuck’s coffee before I arrived.  Only mine was a thermos.  Yet then came the 6-7a crash when the biological clock stopped no matter what.  It was also the time I had to look professional and stand my post. 
    My shift finally ending, I mumbled “Morning” to the 1st shift guard as I lumbered down the front steps and walked to the bus stop.  I slumped my baggage-looking body in the seat far to the back.  Here, I could soliloquize as if talking in my sleep.
    “Could I meet with you for a cup of coffee?” I rehearsed on my way home on the metro.  “Would you like to meet sometime?” I said again.  No, those are called polite, indirect sentences.  How about something more like imperative statements such as “Let’s meet sometime” or “I must have coffee with you!”  No, too eager.
    Days passed and eventually turned months before I’d attempt any moves.  I wasn’t sure.  The starry eyes frightened me.  They seemed scared.  Maybe she felt I was unbecoming. 
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Perhaps my hair was too military-like or my torso too stout or my nose stubby.  Self-consciousness afflicted me.  I knew, however, that she knew I was single (since I pined) and I knew she was, too.  Ms. Kitano and Associates on her office doors gave this away and the fact I assessed her slender ring-less middle finger as she held her coffee that first day.  It also made things more apparent when she threw me a backward smile on her way to the elevator one day.  I was in one of my low moods and her look sublimated my behavior like a dog’s.
    I decided then to learn Japanese.  The whole nine-yards of etiquette, culture norms, food, history and art were included.  In the process one thing I’d learned was one way to get to an Asian woman was through academic standing, or education.  My image had to change.  School called and the easiest subject to study, the Fine Arts.
    “What are you doing?” she surprised me one day as she popped out of the stairway on her way from the parking garage and saw me furtively drawing chiaroscuro of a woman’s face on my paper. 
    “Doodling” I said shakily.  Perhaps she heard my quaver or saw my hand tremble as I felt her lithe, little hand dexterously extend towards mine and antenna-like brush my hand
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caressingly aside but which actually was my other chubby, twitching thumb concealing it.
    “That’s nice” she quipped and squeezed through the mouse hole of the elevator doors.
    Nonetheless, I was determined.  “It’s a portrait” I said as she twinkled with her starry eyes from the dim elevator.  That’s when the other hand did become real.
    “Oh, let me see!” she whispered and the elevator’s doors cleaved open just like our lives.  After getting the nerve to ask her out, we went to the Seattle Art Museum and Bathhouse Theater beside Green Lake and ate seafood at Pike’s Place Market along Elliot Bay.  We took trips to Tokyo where I learned of green tea ceremonies and purification and ate soba noodles and drank the interminably intoxicating drink called Sake, where one day I drank too much and fell and cut my knee and she took me to a doctor who ended up being a tattoo artist and who made a ‘sakura’, or Japanese cherry blossom, from it.  We also drank deeply of each others’ intoxicating love.
    Until that bloody day I can’t see but from the reflection in the front entrance glass doors and the reality of the news.  Right before dinner, the 6 o’clock news and downtown Seattle, a disgruntled office worker went berserk and unloaded .  The
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covered bodies were toted down the stairs, cameras flashing this time all the way down the steps to the back doors of the screaming ambulances, where now scintillated blood stained white sheets and lifeless mannequins.  I was off duty and a client with a grievance shot her and three other associates dead, including the guard.
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    What happened the day before I can’t fully remember but for the flashback of the same reflection staring at me from the mannequin at Starbuck’s now, eyes gravestone still.  The same crowd surrounds her though it’s another day and I in my safer side nearer the Japanese restaurant.  But it is fifteen years later and I’m wearing a suit and a tie since school’s done and it’s my second week at the new job.  I’m an elementary school teacher now.
    But it’s over and I crossed myself.  By this I mean I’ve had to cross over, which is something therapists say means changing your identity and direction and shaking yourself out of your old self and putting something new into it.  But inwardly I’m still me without a real outward assimilation as the light blue eyes indicate from the other side.  They rivet me to attention as her eyes lock with mine.
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    “No way” I say to myself dazedly, as I scrape my chair softly and tuck it gently under my table.  “No way will I let this reflection blur my vision now”, I say again, as I get up from my chair and saunter softly along the outside café’s railing towards the glass doors.  I see her real reflection beaming, my eyes  brighter and beaming now, too.  I throw a look at the glass doors and see myself, her, sitting together and the image the same as the first time I saw her minus the bicyclist.  Skirting around her, I push open the glass doors and in so doing throw her a backward glance, just like she did that last day I saw her at the office and whispered “I love you”, as she passed through our reflections in the glass doors just like I do now into the real world.  Yet I wonder if she heard me, too, and if the mannequin and me we will ever have the time to meet and perhaps drink sake under the cherry blossoms at spring and realize how transient life is.













Memoirs of a Dead School Teacher
By
Sunny  Bu
October 19th, 2013




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Memoirs of a Dead School Teacher
    I’m not dead yet but most likely will be by the time you read this.  It’s easy to foresee with a gun pointed at your head and the Big ‘T’ not for ‘target’ but for ‘teacher’.  You’d think those smart ladies sauntering the office at the school board headquarters would be defenders of their schools and defended, but their smiles and facsimile features reflect the bureaucracy surrounding them and their finger prints from background checks are not their own.  So it is with me.
    I’m nobody, yet.  My debut is 47 years behind and a bright sunny future ahead as I contemplate the rosy sunsets along the Gulf of Mexico, Florida.  My teaching certification isn’t in my wallet yet nor have I even taken the test.  Matter-of-fact, I can taste the sea’s saltiness now sitting on my sailboat in Sarasota Bay and wonder if this adventure-a sailor’s-has more profit in store than teaching.  I glean the golden sunsets now and then, awaken to crimson dawns and snatches of dolphins, but the saying on the walls of my berth in my cabin and my artistic attempts to draw something both meaningful and decorative there says what I believe in at the moment: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, it says, which are words taken from my now defunct U.S. passport and the picture I copied from it.
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    But below these words I drew a seascape of a man-of-war the Department of State had imprinted on their blank passport pages.  The ship’s coming into a U.S. harbor somewhere.  I suppose it meant the Revolutionary War’s over and our country a safe destination civilly, and that the lighthouse guiding it is truth.  So have I returned after undergoing an ideological war I’d fought for over ten years in East Asia and felt the picture meant something compared to other ideologies in terms of democracy being the greatest ideal since the beginning of time. 
    Yet here I am embarking on another journey, again.  I’m embarking into another ideological battle.  It’s one of freedom verses violence, fear verses courage, and human rights against injustice.  You can feel the benefits of freedom more strongly being on the water and if brave enough, on the high seas.  You know man’s meant for this.  You feel-and I more so being a teacher-the impact of that saying transcribed from the Declaration of Independence, that “All men are created equal” and “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”.  My God how I know this.  Years abroad taught me this poignantly, that these words coined by the Declaration of Independence weren’t something rationally contrived, but were natural, spiritual, and embedded in our natures since the realization of free will.  In other words, I had to know and act
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on what these words meant.
    I mean by this that freedom is more than words.  You can feel it in the footsteps and shuffling feet of the school children and teachers.  One can feel its civility compared to the boots of tyranny’s villainy.  There’s even a book of the life of Papillion I have stuck on my boat bookshelf.  He, too, was a sailor, and a brave one.  But he quite lamented The Rights of Man his country founded and which he was denied.  Are there, then, no individual rights?  Is the tour de force of decent civilization wrought by the West of no bearing or significance or sense and this to the individual wishing to emulate democracy and this against the grinding of authoritarian ideologies?
    The Memoirs of a Dead School Teacher can’t face the storm clouds among the bay and the squalls of senselessness my sailboat and I feel awaiting us now.  She’s vulnerable as I am, both of us sitting ducks to the politics at play.  We’re optimistic, however, as my name’s Sunny and hers is Turtle-Dove.  We’ve been on this journey of preparation for the Great Voyage of teaching for two years now as I must make my way to shore to look for a teaching job and leave those words to her care:  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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The Process
    The journey takes me on a bus to the Sarasota County School Board headquarters where an African-American human resource worker assists me to the application process. 
    “Instructional!” I interject solemnly as I ask for an app.  “Not substitute!” I huff, knowing the ordeal of travel without a car and with little pay.  I cross my arms and think “I hope I made the right decision”.
    “Okay, sit at this station and. . .” we’re on the right track.  Name:  Michael (Sunny) Burns.  Address: #5 Bayfront Dr.  City:  Sarasota.  State:  Florida.  D.O.B.: 1965.
    I’m really doing it now.  That is, I’m job hunting in the U.S. and this after ten years abroad.  I actually feel it again, my identity come to life.  I can also feel that sprightly, childhood school boy feeling of being in those safe classrooms when I was a kid and the big, yellow raincoats we donned the first day of school on our way to catch the bus.  I felt the rain prick my cheeks just like the strange kids’ looks and the stranger words now poking at me from the application:  affirmative action.  Inserted within proximity of the background check information one section stands out:  Affirmative action form.
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    I think of the background check and glance at the exit door and at the fortress of the human resource worker’s cubicle.  Her desk’s as imperious as a judge’s bench.  I wonder about lawyers and rights and misdemeanors  and think Expunge it or exclude it?  Can I juxtapose a ten year old less-than-first degree misdemeanor against the present realities facing me, realities which are stated clearly by the saying “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?  I shake my head. 
    “Affirmative action form?” I ask the human resource worker.  “Why do I have to fill this out?”
    “Oh, it’s only if you think you’re being-you know-discriminated against based on race and unfairly treated for hire” she says equivocatingly.  “Don’t worry about it”, she concludes, as if the mainstream image I represent is enough.
      But I am worried and the reasoning behind the entire hiring process, equal rights, background checks and disenfranchise-ment.  I’m worried about a background check verses the imbalances it represents, that all are guilty despite the crime committed and pitting pettiness against innocence, which is perhaps discriminatory in itself.  Moreover, the kid who shot up the university students at Virginia Tech never had a background check, so perhaps the whole school should have their past
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scrutinized.  Or maybe we should realize a background check can mean a catch-22 and therefore is a form of discrimination itself.
    Nonetheless the human resource is African-American and the reasoning behind equal rights I’m not supposed to know, what with all the years being abroad.  Knowledge of human rights and equality were meaningless compared to those words inscribed on my boat’s berth, that “All men are created equal”.  These now converge with the meaning of criminalization verses innocence verses crime and the irrational fears that cultural guilt causes and atonement it seeks.  Yet is there any atonement for political actions?  Is a teacher’s past and a background check all that matter and not society’s guilt? 
    I think of teaching and proceed.  I have to because of freedom to change mankind for the better as a school teacher.  Perhaps I can even change society.  I think of the innocent faces of teachers looming in hallways and of even more innocent students streaming into classrooms.  Will I change them?  Or will society?  Is there any difference an individual can make?
    This is the difference sailor’s seek and their quest.  Is there any relevance to being an individual compared to the vastness of the sea?  Can I shape my future and destiny?  Or are these too great of odds?  The women sailors in Sarasota Bay give me
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courage, just as these female teachers and the human resource worker do standing at the helm of something driven by political spin control.  They’re individuals and affirmative action is necessary just as the human resource worker suddenly makes clear.
      “You through yet?  Seems you’re stuck!” she says nicely.
    “Oh, almost.  I’m having trouble with these references” I say with a sigh.
    “What’s wrong?  It’s quite easy to find three references, no?” she replies.
    “That’s the problem”, I say disappointedly.  “It’s too easy and  my references don’t really know me”, I mumble and fathom the deeper meaning.  My references are those who see me as representing the whole.  They know nothing of the truths and the rights and the ideologies I’ve clung to as an individual while facing those “odds” that were “too great”.  They were those odds pitting democracy against the mass minds of other countries, of individual freedom and rights which our country purports to be an exemplary model of.  I can only hear my references’ responses.


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    “Sure, I’ll be a reference Mikhail” my dad’s buddy Nick says proudly.  “Our kids are failing in math and science and most Americans do service jobs” he pontificates.  Nick speaks fluent Russian and lives in Lake of the Woods, a gated retirement community.  Yet his comment fails to depict the demographic trends surrounding him and our schools and Nick doesn’t yet know those Americans who do service jobs are the immigrants and our future and raison d’etre’.
    “But I’m just an ESOL teacher” I chime in.  “You know, I want to improve English proficiency skills for immigrants.  By the year 2030 half of the U.S. will be Asian and Hispanic and these will be the new. . .leaders” I squeeze in sheepishly as my heart gets stuck in my throat at these last words.  Learning English and the future well being of our country don’t quite equate with Americans.
    “Dam immigrants are illegal and living on our taxes” my step-father says simplistically.  “Send them back if they don’t learn English” is all he can muster.
    Yet I know cultural identity is a big factor for their academic and social success.  The culture I believe in, the one inscribed in the constitution and now on my boat’s bulkheads, is too.  Are the two at odds?  I can only think of the statistics.
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The Statistics
    The process of being a teacher is part of this cultural mindset, however, that you can be part of this culture but not really believe in it, just like I’d done for over thirty years.  You can also be part of this culture and live like a statistic, meaning you’re insignificant.  This is what most of these immigrants don’t want.  Neither do teachers.
      In other words, the ladies at the school headquarters and human resources know the statistics:  I’ll last three years as a teacher tops.  Nationally, 22 per cent of new teachers will quit within the first three years.  In Los Angeles, California, more than 50 percent give up their profession within this time frame, and in a study in North Carolina, 17 percent leave the profession after the first year, 30 percent by 3 years and 36 percent by five.  Most of these-53 percent-will be from urban settings and according to Washington State, 29 percent leave because they felt no control over their students.  The main reasons teachers leave, then?  Disciplinary problems among students.
      I hand in my application.  I’m finished with the first step of The Process.  Affirmative action is taking the direction you believe in.  It’s based on action and begins with what sailors call
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plotting a course.  It requires dead reckoning and the will to be a standout individual and not a statistic.
    Nonetheless, I feel a statistic now waiting to happen. The click of news channels at the coffee shop depict the faces and victims:  Virginia Tech, Columbine and Sandy Hook.  They’re so real and yet so far away, so distant from the reality of this nice sunny environment of Florida and the one I live in.  Dean ‘The Can-Man’ brings me back to reality as I walk by on my way to class one day and see him digging for more aluminum in the park’s dumpsters.
    “How’ya doin’, Sunny?” he says cocking his head up as I stumble upon him half buried in a garbage can almost like Sesame Street’s The Cookie Monster.
    “Good Dean.  You hear the news though?” I manage to squeeze out.
    “What news?”
    “I don’t what to tell you, but it’s bad” I say and look down.
    Sandy Hook bad, I think.  Right when I return from the physically safe schools of Asia but the not so safe international politics abroad, the anti-Americanism and the Chinese economic  explosion and the North Korean belligerence of
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nuclear bombs, my course of ambition to become a teacher runs aground by the shootings in Connecticut.  How will I determine my destination now and the longitude and latitude that mark me without any protection?  What of the submerged rocks of society’s social evils sinking schools and states one by one as well as impeding a teacher’s state of progress and mind?
    “Yeah, well I don’t watch the news” Dean replies standoffishly.  “Don’t have time”.
    Time, I muse, the times we face and don’t see either.  Not at least statistically speaking.  But there is no time left and I want to go home, just like the African-American boy had pleaded before the gun-men of Columbine.  Turtle-Dove is awaiting me.  So is the student whose sense of freedom is on standby and the teacher in the classroom who’s the standard bearer, which is also just like the lighthouse guiding the man-of-war into safe harborage in the drawing on my bulkheads.  The guiding force is truth.  But I forgot to tell you:  my background check may still be denied just as The Rights of Man I’d searched to find for over ten years abroad may never be granted, particularly to these students awaiting change from the fear, the demagoguery and the dangers inherent in their countries and which are juxtaposed to a country and culture that purports to be that guiding force.